Modem communication systems and modern work methods often involve communications between corporate employees and corporate customers by various means, including e-mail, voice calls, picture messaging, SMS messaging, and like electronic communications. Further, there is a tendency for communications devices to increasingly become more personal and mobile, with the result that a corporation may have several communications devices operating on multiple different technologies such as GSM, WAP, G3 mobile, e-mail, internet, public service telephone network (PSTN) and other technologies. In general, employees have greater freedom to communicate digitally, and are less constrained than previously by the physical limitations of communications apparatus such as land line telephone handsets and computer terminals which can only be accessed at fixed physical points.
At the same time, increased legislation concerning fraud, employment, and professional conduct place a heavy burden on corporations in ensuring that their employees conduct business ethically, legally, and in compliance with their own internal management policies.
There is a problem that corporations are exposed to communication systems which reduce the amount of control which managers of those corporations have in managing their organization, whilst at the same time being exposed to increasing levels of regulation, legislation, and compliance requirements. There is a problem in that managers of organizations cannot monitor communications in and out of their organizations efficiently, and yet are exposed to any liability resulting from inept, illegal or incompetent activities being carried out via those incoming and outgoing communications.
A conventional known voice telecommunications system, using a local switch at an enterprise such as a corporation, office, hospital or the like provides telephone handsets having call conferencing facilities. In order to initiate a conference call, typically the user of a telephone handset needs to deliberately input a set of keypad instructions, e.g. dialing a particular number or sequence of numbers on a keypad, in order to set up and initiate a conference facility.
In other known prior art systems, for example using land line telephones over the public service telephone network (PSTN), conference calls, such as international conference calls, can be booked in advance for a particular time through various network operators. Each party to the conference call is given a separate telephone number to dial, at a pre-determined time, in order to join a multi-party conference call. Again, this requires the person wishing to join the conference call or to initiate the conference call typing a specific keypad sequence of numbers or digits in order to set up or join a conference call.
In each of the above cases, the persons who are party to the conference call, and who are initiating' a communications call are in control of the conferencing facility, that is, it set up, duration and termination, and are fully aware that they are party to a conference call. Parties to the conference call can terminate or edit the conference call as they see fit. Such features are common place in prior art telecommunications systems.
It is known in prior art mobile wireless networks having a plurality of base stations and a plurality of mobile telephone handsets, for the network operator to be able to disable a particular mobile handset remotely. This might occur where the user reports that mobile handset as having been stolen, and therefore wishes to prevent the new (illegal) user of the mobile handset accruing call charges to the true user's account. Disabling of the mobile phone is effected by disabling the SIM card in the phone remotely from a network management console. This is known as “zapping” the phone or SIM card. However, this feature is a relatively crude on/off enablement and disablement facility. The new, illegal user of the phone and/or SIM card are immediately aware when the phone has been interfered with by the network operator, since it becomes disabled and will not operate. Typically, once “zapped”, by being disabled, the phone and SIM card will be thrown away, since the illegal user is aware that the phone can now no longer be used.
It is known in the United Kingdom, that during times of national emergency, civil unrest, or terrorist alert, there are national broadcast systems in place for disseminating warnings and alert messages to the general public, and to key military and/or civilian individuals. Included in such systems are provisions to deliver mobile local or national alerts from radio stations to mobile wireless devices from radio and television stations in the event of national emergency or other national or regional alert, on behalf of national or regional government or local councils. Such systems are derived from the emergency broadcasting system (EBS), initially developed following the Second World War, in the US and subsequently revised and termed the emergency alert system (EAS) in or around 1997.